Engineering Manager, Subscriptions

Strava•San Francisco, CA

6d•$222,000 - $248,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Strava is hiring an Engineering Manager on our Subscriptions team. This team owns Strava's payments and subscription platform, both the infrastructure and the user-facing products it powers. We're looking for a technical manager who still writes code and wants to grow a small team of backend engineers while owning some of Strava's most critical systems. We follow a flexible hybrid model that translates to more than half of your time on-site in our San Francisco office, three days per week.

Requirements

5+ years of professional software development experience in backend engineering.
2+ years of engineering management experience, or demonstrated tech lead experience where you were already doing the job of coaching engineers, driving technical direction, and owning delivery for a team.
Proficiency in at least one of Strava's backend languages (Ruby, Java, Scala, Python, or Go).
Experience with distributed systems and production infrastructure (MySQL, Redis, Kafka, Kubernetes, or similar).
Experience with, or genuine interest in, payments, billing, or subscription systems.
A track record of helping engineers grow through direct feedback, mentorship, and sponsorship.

Responsibilities

Lead a team of server engineers building Strava's subscription and payments backend, systems that power how millions of athletes subscribe, pay, and manage their subscriptions.
Own the technical roadmap for payments and subscription infrastructure. You'll partner closely with product and engineering leadership on priorities, balancing platform investment, reliability, and delivery.
Drive both platform and product work. Your team owns our subscription infrastructure and the user-facing products it powers.
Stay hands-on in the codebase. You'll write code, own technical designs, and make architecture decisions alongside your team, not just review them.
Hire, develop, and retain engineers at multiple levels. Coach people through career growth, give direct feedback, and build a team that gets stronger over time.
Keep payment and subscription services reliable and healthy. You own on-call, incident response, and the operational bar for your team's systems.
Partner cross-functionally with product, design, accounting, and marketing to identify the highest-leverage work and ship it.
Treat ownership seriously. Your team's systems handle payments, billing, and subscription state for millions of users. You take reliability, correctness, and incident response personally.
Grow your engineers. You'll manage people at different career stages and help each one develop, whether that's getting someone to senior or helping a more experienced engineer take on larger technical ownership.
Build for the long term. You make pragmatic tradeoffs between shipping now and investing in the platform, and you can explain those tradeoffs clearly to partners.
Stay technical. You're not managing from a distance. You have informed opinions on system design and you can unblock engineers by jumping into the code.
Make the team better. You care about how the team works, not just what they ship. You'll fix what's slowing people down and build processes that stick.